In anticipation of Kevin Brockmeier's visit to the store this Wednesday, we spent a pleasurable weekend passing around his new story collection, The View from the Seventh Layer. Like a good album, each cut has its own distinct character and you're not left trying to recall the particulars of each story when you're done.
We first met Kevin several years ago on the book tour for his debut collection, Things That Fall from the Sky. He was a quiet, unassuming guy, though he delivered a very dynamic, theatrical reading. This is indicative, in a way, of his stories, which often describe misfits and loners and their confrontations with the fantastic.
The title story of the new book, for instance, follows a shy girl through her life on a tropical island, selling maps to tourists and dispensing of insects for her eccentric neighbor. We learn about her through her daydreams — her observations on books she's read (though she's forsaken books for now) and her memories of inscriptions she made in high school annuals. The polished, exacting prose and the girl's teasing mentions of a prior encounter with "the Entity" lulls us into a reader's trance, as this strange and wonderful tale of a life, both simple and complex, unfolds. We may not all be sure of the point, but it was pleasant and memorable.
This marriage of the fantastic and the mundane is Brockmeier's stock in trade. Here we find it again and again. In one story, the inhabitants of a city collectively seek to obliterate all noise, only to find that the silence drives them mad. A Chekhov-inspired story relates a love affair between a man and a woman, though it's set on a far-off planet in the distant future. Brockmeier even borrows the Choose Your Own Adventure device, based on the best-selling kids' books from the 1980s, though instead of allowing the reader to choose his/her own path through an action story, he suggests how even the most ordinary daily decisions may lead to the same drastic conclusion.
Perhaps our favorite, though, was "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth," the story of a pastor whose boring sermons are enlivened by a mysterious presence. At first he believes God is guiding his inspired words, then comes to fear that a ghost may have been sent to challenge his piety. It's a marvelous, classically constructed tale with just the right dash of the supernatural.
Brockmeier is from Little Rock, home also to our beloved writer Charles Portis. If he has anything to share about Portis, we'll let you know. Regardless, we hope you'll come out and hear him read, or give his book a shot. Order a copy and we'll have him inscribe it to you, high school annual-style.
And on a final note, we have received a mysterious package here at Turnrow, wrapped in brown paper and addressed to Kevin Brockmeier. This may be of only slight interest, and a possible violation of the bookseller-author confidentiality agreement, but we mention it only because it is so Brockmeierien.
